Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips
Born	(1951-06-04) 4 June 1951 United Kingdom
Occupation(s)	Journalist, Author
Notable credit	Daily Mail columnist The Guardian columnist The Spectator correspondent Author of Londonistan
Spouse	Joshua Rozenberg
Children	2

Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications. Phillips is a regular panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze and on BBC One's Question Time.

Personal life, education, and career

Phillips was born into a Jewish family, her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop; they were both committed Labour voters. She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford

Training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, as her probationary period in the provinces, then compulsory for the profession. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, she spent a short period at the New Society magazine, before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. Gaining initial attention for articles on the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants, she broke a story that some female immigrants were being submitted to virginity tests at Heathrow Airport. The policy was quickly changed.

After a stint as the paper's news editor, Phillips fainted on her first day in 1984, she started writing her own opinion column in 1987. As a writer for The Guardian in 1982 she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party.

Leaving The Guardian, her relationship with the newspaper's readers had become fraught, "like a really horrific family argument", she once said, Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian's sister-paper The Observer in 1993, and then to the Sunday Times in 1998, before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, now hosted by The Spectator.

She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996. In 2009, she was awarded the Sappho Prize (an award given to a 'journalist who combines excellence in his/her work with courage and a refusal to compromise') by the Danish Free Press Society.

She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, former legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph. They have two children.

Political views

The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [U.K.] media's leading right-wing voices" and a "controversial" columnist, although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy. She began her career on the liberal left with the Guardian newspaper, and her gradual drift to the centre-right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to discuss, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods, science, Islam, anti-semitism, and Israeli policy; to criticise civil partnerships for same-sex couples; and to support strict anti-drug policies. She has questioned Barack Obama's connections with what, she describes as, "transformational Marxists". She has written "in support" of Geert Wilders, who she says is being criminalised "for telling the truth".

Israel

Phillips often defends the state of Israel's defence policy. She believes that while "individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project". She has also claimed that certain examples of footage, which supposedly shows people injured by Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas, has been "fabricated/faked".

She argues that many critics of the state of Israel's military policies (including many Jews) are motivated by anti-Semitism. She has described the paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel" and expressed her astonishment at what she calls "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper".

In December 2008, Phillips claimed that Hamas rocket strikes on southern Israel constituted "genocide". She futher referred to the United Nations as the "Club of Terror UN" (sic), and argued that "Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think — grotesquely — that not enough Israelis have been killed".

Phillips was voted 'Most Islamophobic Media Personality of the Year' in 2003 by the British-based Islamic Human Rights(Sic)Commission.

However, Phillips has also commented that "Criticism of Israel’s behaviour is perfectly legitimate." As such, she has criticized the Ariel Sharon administration in Israel for policies such as targeted assassinations and house demolition in Palestinian villiages. She says that those policies leave her "appalled".

The Church of England

In a recent article, she criticised the membership and leadership of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in Britain, and specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, accusing them of antisemitism because of remarks made by the Archbishop about the plight of Bethlehem Christians under Israeli occupation; another factor was an opinion poll showing that the majority of Anglicans were opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The article ended with a condemnation of what she sees as the churches' failure to criticise the President of Iran's desire to "destroy Israel", and that "the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust".

In an article in the Spectator she alleges, “Many will be deeply shocked that the Church of England harbours individuals with such attitudes. But the church hierarchy is unlikely to act against them. Extreme hostility towards Israel is the default position among bishops and archbishops; while the establishment line is to reach out towards Islam in an attempt to accommodate and appease it. With Christians around the world suffering forced conversion, ethnic cleansing and murder at Islamist hands, the church utters not a word of protest. Instead, inter-faith dialogue is the order of the day…” [2]

Iraq Study Group

Phillips has described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous". She has also written that James Baker and Jimmy Carter are "the kept creatures of the Arab world" and that "they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel's destruction".

Views on Science

Evolution

For many, the claim that evolution enabled life to cross the species barrier so that humans are merely the last link in the evolutionary chain remains a step too far — not least because, by the standards science itself sets, it fails the test of evidence. It is merely a theory. — Melanie Phillips

Phillips argues that evolution is "merely a theory." She writes that it "does not explain the irreducible complexity of certain cells for example, which cannot have been formed by simple organisms coming together". She claims that it "does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began". She has also defended the teaching of creationism, alongside the teaching of evolution, in schools.

MMR vaccine

Despite a scientific consensus that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the vaccine, insisting that "urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered". Science writer and physician Ben Goldacre has called Phillips "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science".

Global warming

Phillips has said of global warming that the current "warm spell is well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century", that blaming "warming on mankind’s activities in producing carbon dioxide" is "utter garbage", and that the campaign to stop man-made global warming is like a "witch-hunt" and is “one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age”. She compares environmentalists to Nazis, writing: "It was no accident that Hitler was a green." She has criticised John McCain for his environmental policies: "Anyone who endorses, as he does, the man-made global warming scam displays an alarming absence of judgment and common sense".

George Monbiot has accused her of "scientific illiteracy" and says she is aligned with a "denial industry" funded by oil and tobacco companies.

Accusations of "McCarthyism"

Phillips' vehement criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her position on Israel has been condemned by Jewish writers like Jonathan Freedland, Rabbi David Goldberg as well as the non-Jewish Johann Hari. Freedland was horrified that Phillips called a group of liberal Jews called Independent Jewish Voices "Jews For Genocide", writing in the Jewish Chronicle:

Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV... But even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide — literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people... it is an absurdity, one that drains the word “genocide” of any meaning. For if Mike Leigh and Stephen Fry are for genocide, what word is left to describe, say, the Sudanese regime?

— Jonathan Freedland, The Danger of Melanie Phillips

Hari quoted the former editor of Ha'aretz, who called Phillips' behaviour "nascent McCarthyism" and further argued "it is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works". Phillips responded by accusing Hari of believing in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hari pointed out in response that he had worked undercover to expose Neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists who believe in the Protocols, receiving death threats as a result, and said her arguments are "beyond the boundaries of civilised disagreement".

She was interviewed by the journalist Jackie Ashley about her book Londonistan, and Ashley also argues that Phillips aims to stifle discussion. In response to a comment that some of Phillips' views are a bit "bonkers", Phillips argued that:

If the response to the kind of things I'm saying is to pretend that it's not happening, and worse, to characterise people like me as paranoid, hysterical, mad, this is first of all nasty stuff, it's vicious, but it is aimed at shutting down discussion of this completely. It's the tactics used by Stalin to call political opponents mad. But it does have echoes of the 1930s because the Jews then tried to draw attention to what was going on in Germany, and they too were told they were hysterical and paranoid.

— Jackie Ashley, The multicultural menace, anti-semitism and me

Ashley contends that:

Phillips is quick to take offence. That she has just compared a gentle, quizzical interviewer to a complacent pre-Nazi-era German and to Stalin might - just might - have struck others as potentially offensive. That she finds a continuum between law-abiding, peaceful Muslim fellow citizens and terrorists might - just might - strike others as potentially "inflammatory". That her newspaper, the Daily Mail, pursues anyone who dares criticise it by vilifying them for years afterwards might - just might - strike her as an example of the intellectual bullying she attacks. And perhaps her emailing my editor before I have even sat down at the keyboard to write this article is, at the very least, unusually defensive behaviour.

— Jackie Ashley, The multicultural menace, anti-semitism and me

Aberystwyth University

Phillips has commented on what she sees as the politicisation of education, particularly at Aberystwyth University. In 2005, she claimed there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on Aberystwyth University, based upon an unnamed student's testimony.

In 2008, Phillips again criticised teaching at the university, based on the testimony of another unnamed student on the course, who made accusations against Marie Breen Smyth regarding the content of her course, providing the handbook for the course as evidence for its alleged left-wing bias, as well as the text of a lecture given at Oxford university by Richard Jackson, Breen Smyth's colleague, in which he accused Israel of state terrorism. Writing in her Spectator blog, she argued that Marie Breen Smyth was politically profiling students (based on the obligatory survey which students were required to take at the start of her course to assess their views on terrorism and its causes), and marking work down for expressing undesirable opinions. She also compared the University to the brainwashers of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union perfected the targeting of the young by propaganda ... to shape their minds and thus control society. Is it any wonder that so many of our young people are now consumed by hatred of America and Israel?

— Melanie Phillips, Terror in academia

Phillips also wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the university complaining that Breen Smyth was a "subversive" that should not be allowed to teach. These accusations were strenuously denied by Breen Smyth.

Books

In All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, Phillips offered a detailed critique of the British education system, claiming that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.)

In 2003, she published The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement. As well as the history, the book also detailed the evolution of the various ideas that lay behind the movement.

Her latest book, Londonistan, was published in 2006. In it, Philips claims that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain.

• The Divided House: Women at Westminster, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980, ISBN 0-283-98547-X.
• Doctors' Dilemmas: Medical Ethics and Contemporary Science by Melanie Phillips & John Dawson, Harvester Press, 1985, ISBN 0-7108-0983-2.
• All Must Have Prizes, Warner, 1998, ISBN 0-7515-2274-0.
• The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Social Market Foundation, 1999, ISBN 1-874097-64-X.
• America's Social Revolution, Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2001, ISBN 1-903386-15-2.
• The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement and the Ideas Behind it, Little, Brown, 2003, ISBN 0-316-72533-1.
• Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, Gibson Square Books Ltd, 2006, ISBN 1-903933-76-5.

External links

• Phillips' personal website
• Her blog at The Spectator